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Everything You Wanted to Know About Gears of War...

Among the many members of Epic Games who worked behind the scenes on its blockbuster title Gears of War, few reveled in the limelight nearly as much as the game's lead designer, Cliff Bleszinski (or Cliffy B., as he's known to many in the industry). Earlier today, Bleszinski delivered a speech to a packed house regarding the background of and keys to Gears' success. Entitled "Designing Gears of War: Iteration Wins," the session was a veritable blitzkrieg into the design philosophy behind one of last year's most critically acclaimed titles.

Bleszinski wasted no time in cutting to the chase. The session was designed with emphasis on a few key ideas: the concept of combining new and familiar gameplay elements, lead design cabal-driven process, and how iterations of progress helped sculpt the end product. In essence, Gears was an extensive exercise in failed ideas where going back to the drawing board, collaborating as a group, and intelligently compromising lead to a stronger product.

Learning From Mistakes

The idea behind Gears initially pegged the game as another FPS designed to show off the Unreal Engine 3.0; in fact, many saw demo footage at E3 2005 of a supposed Unreal 3 that would go on to become Gears. The concept name was Unreal Warfare, but, as Bleszinski explained, the Epic team began, over time, to nix the idea of yet another FPS. He showed off early concept art of Cog soldiers and the prototypical Locusts, which were referred to as Geists, until Epic ran into a wall with Nintendo's registration of a game with the same title. The Geists then became Worms, which tied in with the tunneling ideas behind the game. Finally, members of the team conceived the name Locust, as it tied in well with both insects and the idea of plagues.

The idea behind Gears' shooting mechanics came in a section of the presentation known as "Resident Killswitch." Someone popped in a copy of Namco's 2003 shooter kill.switch, which many touted as one of the first console action games to sell itself on a cover mechanic, and Bleszinski touted his love of Resident Evil 4 as a central influence on Gears' shooting mechanics.

It was at this point that the idea of iteration came through, as he went through the many ideas in Gears that were ultimately shot down. At one point, the team had considered allowing the Cogs to loot corpses in the field and spend the earnings on upgradeable weapons. The was ultimately nixed for taking too much away from the action elements of the game. The team had also considered a morale meter, but killed that idea after realizing that the conditions for unleashing miserable teammates would be too finicky for what they desired, and that it would be unrewarding for the player. Finally, Epic had considered including an orders system, which partially made it into the final product, but feels significantly less like Full Spectrum Warrior than the original idea suggested.

Because Bleszinski presented Gears as a highly successful game built upon experience learned through mistakes, he then detailed which elements of the game rose from the ashes to become the final product. The team unanimously agreed that they wanted a slower-paced shooter than Unreal that was built upon trade-offs (L-trigger lends more precise targeting, but at the cost of battlefield visibility), no space aliens, a world that combined cutting-edge technology with contemporary machinery, and the embracing of certain cliches while shedding others. Or as Bleszinski said, "We wanted a badass antihero and a wise-cracking sidekick, but no cigar-chomping characters."